October 2009

A decommissioned fire engine pulls up, and out pour dazzling stilt walkers, flamenco-skirted fan-wielding dancers, brass players of all kinds, a lone battery-powered bass player, and drummers wearing harnessing made from bike parts, all decked out in costumes that range from Village People camp to steampunk goth glam.

They may start marching down the block, playing on the upper deck of a ferry or at a major stadium, or dancing a hole in the dance floor. They may break into wild Balkan dances, down-and-dirty New Orleans-style jams, madcap circus romps, or the theme song to Rocky. They may do just about anything.

This is the MarchFourth Marching Band, often called “M4” by fans, a quirky, funky instant party of a group whose twenty-five odd members make, sew, build, drive, design, choreograph, compose, and mix everything themselves. This includes their latest album, Rise Up and their upcoming national tour this fall. The band’s DIY ethic is epitomized with the customized bus that they bought on Ebay and lovingly refitted, from its kitchenette and Wi-Fi to its seat cushions and curtains (the fire engine is just for local transportation).

The carpenters, stonemasons, artists, business owners, metal workers, physical therapists, and lawyers of March Fourth have similarly transformed the staid conformity of the good old marching band into a sparkling celebration of vibrant individuality. “There’s no uniformity to our uniforms,” laughs dancer, stilt walker, and long-time M4 member, Nayana Jennings. “It’s really individual. There’s no dress code. We don’t tell people what they have to wear. It depends on the person and how long they’ve been with the band. The longer they play, the more costumes they have.”

The group never meant to become a huge touring ensemble. Born at a March 4th Fat Tuesday celebration several years ago, the band’s founders—including a New Orleans transplant who contributed 100-year-old Mardi Gras flambeaux to their first performances—had such a good time and made such a strong impression that soon they were performing at dozens of block parties, rallies, corporate parties, and weddings around Portland, OR. Before they knew it, the band had swelled to nearly three dozen performers and was playing major West Coast and world music festivals, including a guest appearance at the Hollywood Bowl with friends and fellow Portlanders Pink Martini.

The band’s music bursts with this eclectic energy, in songs like “Dynomite!,” a Latin-flavored electro-house anthem with a sly nod to ’90s rapper Coolio. Or the off-kilter Balkan meters of “Simplon Cocek.” Or the tongue-in-cheek fiesta of “Contada Ridiculata,” which inspired one M4 member to toss package after package of corn tortillas into the crowd as the dancers swirled flamenco-style skirts. “Our mission is to cover every possible genre of music in the world,” bandleader John Averill exclaims.

Just as MarchFourth has never met a style of music they didn’t like, they’ve never met a performance opportunity they couldn’t handle. “Other bands are stationary in one location, and people have to come to the band. We can come to the people and move them from place to place,” explains Jennings. “That flexibility is our biggest asset, not having a stage or a spatial difference between us and them. We get really close to the audience. There’s an inclusiveness to our band that people don’t get from other performers. We can march off the stage into the crowd after the show and literally rub elbows,” even in 106-degree heat in the California desert or after hours of parading uphill through a suburban L.A. canyon.

There’s a spontaneity, too, that flows from having a very large group of very creative people marching together. MarchFourth has taken to the streets to celebrate momentous occasions like the election of Barack Obama and has turned rides on subways into impromptu concerts. “The drummers were banging out percussion on the window and walls, and the brass players were all singing their horn parts and things like that. People on the subway were wondering what was going on,” Jennings smiles. “Surprisingly, we’ve seldom been shut down.”

Quite the opposite, in fact: some of the band’s most exciting performances have been completely spur of the moment. After the bus broke down on Vancouver Island during a recent tour, the group spent all day working with mechanics to get their ride up and running. They missed their ferry back to the mainland and were poised to miss their next gig.

“We had to take what ferry we could get,” Jennings recalls. “We realized we were going to miss the festival we were supposed to play next, the first time we ever missed a show. So we decided to put on a show on the ferry. Everyone got in costume, got out their instruments, and played for an hour. The ferry operator and crew were so enthusiastic and people got really into it. We wound up selling forty CDs and made hundreds in tips, more than we have at some festivals.”

The enthusiasm is contagious when MarchFourth kicks in -- sometimes a bit too contagious. At a recent celebration of the group’s birthday at Portland’s historic Crystal Ballroom, things got a bit out of hand. A special stage had been set up for M4’s dancers on the venue’s renowned “floating” dance floor, which bounces gently as dancers move across it thanks to its unique mechanical construction.

When the band called for audience members with a March 4th birthday to come up on the dancers’ stage, so many people piled on and boogied that the stage legs poked a hole through the floor. “We literally danced a hole in the floor,” Jennings laughs. “They had to repair the old wood with a copper plaque, and we wondered if we could get it engraved to remember the occasion.”

Yet the collapsing stages, forced canyon marches, and various other breakdowns and train wrecks work only to add more creative fuel to the fire for a group whose size and diversity would seem to doom it to entropy. “Humor is what helps keeps us sane in all the chaos. We laugh a lot on tour,” explains Jennings. “That, and love. That’s why we do this.”

It all started when adolescent Meera Bai witnessed a marriage procession and asked “Who will be my bridegroom?” Her nanny playfully showed her a miniature idol of Krishna and said ‘Him!’ Thus began this Indian girl’s lifelong fascination. What started as an innocent childhood fantasy, led to her fervent love of Lord Krishna. Meera’s obsession became the defining factor in her life, causing her to leave behind wealth and royalty and become a wandering mystic with a great following. Now, five centuries later, her poetry is well-known throughout India and celebrated worldwide.

The intriguing story of Meera Bai’s mystical, fascinating, and tragic existence, comes to life on Meera - The Lover…, the debut album from Canadian-Indian singer Vandana Vishwas, whose own life story adds poignancy to the recording.

Beautiful and intelligent Meera Bai was a poetess of exceptional caliber from the western Indian province of Rajasthan in the sixteenth century. She married a handsome prince at a very young age. During her marriage, she never lost her childhood infatuation towards Lord Krishna, and prolifically wrote poems of her love for him. Her husband soon died in a war, and although she was expected to burn in his funeral pyre, Meera Bai refused to participate in the then prevalent widow-suicide tradition of sati, publicly declaring that her husband Lord Krishna was still alive! This stance caused her significant duress in a patriarchal society where public expression of romantic feelings was taboo, even if for a divine idol. She was ostracized for her choices and her poetry by her in-laws, but she developed a following of many devotees who joined her in her loving devotion to Krishna. Vandana’s musical exploration of Meera Bai’s life follows her poetry chronologically, with each poem representing a distinct moment in the emotional state of the spiritual leader.

Meera Bai’s songs have often been recorded and sung as Krishna bhajans – religious devotional songs in honor of Krishna. However, Vandana’s compositions emphasize the romantic side of Meera Bai’, hence the title, Meera - The Lover… “Meera’s poems are very, very impressive in terms of literature and expression,” says Vandana. “Whenever I read her poems I feel like composing music for them. Her poetry is so strong. The way she talks about Krishna…as if not about a god, but about a lover. There is this fine line between devotion and romance which is transcended in her poems.” Today, Meera Bai’s poems are recognized as exceptional works, part of the literature in Indian schools, and are gaining international popularity as devotional songs among kirtan enthusiasts and yoga practitioners.

Vandana’s own life story, with its tragedies and triumphs, has brought her to develop a fond affinity with Meera Bai. Vandana’s connection with Meera began as early as her teenage years, when she was an All India Radio contract artist, and, along with her Guru Mr. D.K. Gandhe, she composed some of Meera Bai’s songs. Legendary Indian songbirds Lata Mangeshkar and Kishori Amonkar, who each beautifully sang Meera bhajans, also inspired her fascination with Meera Bai.

Vandana’s dream as a little girl was to be a Bollywood playback singer, but the lasting effects of a painful and immobilizing physical disability, inflicted upon her barely two days after her birth by a nurse using an unsterilized syringe, prevented her from being able to pursue that dream.

Now, Vandana is fulfilling that dream all by herself. While there is no actual movie in the making, Vandana sings the story of Meera Bai’s life in a way that invokes a visual story. Meera’s love for Lord Krishna can be summarized in broadly distinct phases: innocent devotion; longing; realization of romantic feelings; requisition;indifference to world; declaration of love to family; and finally, a state of mind in trance and detached from the affairs of the world.

Vandana symbolically represents each phase of Meera’s love towards Krishna by composing one song for each phase from her collection and treating them with an appropriate element from Indian classical music, to evoke respective emotions. Thus, Raag Des adorns the romantic rain song “Badara Re,” Raag Darbari emotes the declaration of love in the King’s courtroom in “Rana Ji,” and serene notes of Bhairav Thaat amplify detachment and longing in “Chala Wahi Des.” Each song tells a piece of the story from Meera Bai’s life, and the components of each song are important parts of the telling. For example, in Hindi artwork, Lord Krishna is often depicted as a cow herder, playing a flute which not only calls to the animals, but also to his thousands of gopis (milkmaids) who follow the sound of his flute from far away. Vandana uses the sound of the flute to represent the presence of Krishna. It further represents the longing for something which is simply out of reach, which Meera and other devotees can hear, but never see.

Like a Bollywood soundtrack, this recording follows the story of Meera Bai’s devotion and love for Lord Krishna, a tale ripe with blockbuster themes of resilience in struggle, and the power of love to triumph. Vandana draws on her own personal experiences and lifelong studies of vocal technique to illustrate Meera’s story with meticulously painted aural landscapes.

Dancing in dusty backyards to quill-tipped gaita flutes and resonant drums, the people of Colombia’s Caribbean coast villages cultivate songs and sounds that sprung from the traditions of indigenous peoples, the Spanish conquistadores who came to their lands five centuries ago, and the African slaves they soon brought with them. On the island of Mompos where the Magdelena River meets the sea, Latinized European brass and guitar flow seamlessly into Indian gaita melodies and bold vocals, all to a powerful African pulse—in an amalgam that varies from village to village.

This is the legendary Totó La Momposina’s home turf, the land and people who inspired her to carry the musical torch of five generations of ancestors, and develop their traditions, pursuing her passionate love for Colombia’s long neglected and disdained Afro-indigenous music with dogged determination in her native land, in Europe, and now worldwide. Totó’s travels will bring her to Queens, NY, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, CA and Miami this August to celebrate her latest album, La Bodega (Astar Artes; digital release August 3, 2009).

Totó has become a cosmopolitan sensation, but she first fell in love with her art thanks to musical parents and an amazing group of mentors, from village wise women singers to Afro-Colombian drum makers. Her parents, musicians from a long line of musical forbearers, left their home on the island of Mompos in search of economic opportunity in the city, but found they had profound prejudice to contend with—so they founded a music and dance ensemble. Colombia’s turbulent politics and brutal civil war eventually took the family to Bogotá.

But Totó’s musical soul was forged in the backyards and village squares of Mompos, where she learned songs from cantadoras like Ramona Ruiz, her mother’s elderly cousin in the family’s native village of Talaigua. “This is really where I got started,” Totó reflects, “at the cantadoras’ parties.” Ruiz and her fellow villagers drew in part on the legacy of coastal Indians, who make gaita flutes from cactus wood and duck quills (“Margarita”) and keep many ceremonies and traditions alive, despite intermingling with other populations and ideas that arrived on the coast.

The village cantadora does everything from healing with herbs and giving marital advice to running celebrations and leading songs. “Imagine the backyard of a thatched poor homestead. Chickens have been moved out of the way,” explains John Hollis, Totó’s manager and son-in-law. “There’s lots of dust and it’s really hot, and in the middle is a group of drummers. And around them are the cantadoras, leading the songs, and around them people stand clapping and singing the chorus.”

Another close friend and mentor was the drummer and instrument maker Batata, who was working in construction when Totó first met him. Batata and his relatives make up “the royal family of African drummers, as Totó puts it,” and he introduced Totó to the unique rhythms and the bass thumb piano-like marímbula kept alive in the northern Colombian region around Palenque de San Basilio, a town founded by escaped slaves who spoke their own language, home to songs like “Dueño de los Jardines.” From a more Indian-inspired village herself, Totó reveled in the full palette of Colombia’s African sounds Batata showed her while traveling through the region, absorbing the beats and drums (“Tembandumba”).

These two streams of tradition along the Magdelena River—the indigenous and the African—meet in what has become an imminently familiar pop sound across Latin America, the cumbia “when Indians and Africans dance together,” Totó smiles.

In urban Colombia, where the cumbia was once looked down upon, the mid-century denigration of coastal music and culture in general gradually shifted thanks in part to big dance bands that took up cumbia and other party-friendly rhythms and to singers like Totó. From there, the cumbia spread into the heart of Mexico and deep into South America. “Manita Uribe,” dedicated to Totó’s sister, is a rollicking, brass-inflected classic cumbia rich with coastal flavor.

Backyard choruses and village rhythms pushed Totó to turn away from a more well-trodden path for a coastal musician and take a gamble. She headed to Paris in hopes of launching an international career. Life in Colombia was a struggle, and Totó hoped to find a more receptive audience and new approaches in Europe, where she studied the history of dance for a year at the Sorbonne and made her first recording.

Several years passed, with Totó returning to Colombia, but eventually her big break came: a groundbreaking tour with WOMAD festivals across three continents and a popular major label album, thanks to her energetic grace, musical inventiveness, and deep commitment to her beloved traditions. Much as Susana Baca did for Afro-Peruvian music, Totó has put Afro-Colombian music on the map for global audiences and increasingly, for her compatriots back home. Young Colombians from urban backgrounds have taken a new interest in Afro-Colombian and coastal sounds, researching and playing once frowned-upon traditional songs from Bogotá to New York.

This is exactly what Totó had hoped for during the long years walking the streets of Paris or keeping the party going in Talaigua. “I make music to show to the world the expression of my soul, my heritage,” Totó muses, “the expression of what I feel without thinking in duality, without class conflict and politics. Without selfishness. True love—that is what I want to express.”

The guitar hero, the tumultuous bard, the fierce philosopher, the young firebrand: Friends in the wilderness, who turned from comrades in arms in a bloody desert rebellion into dedicated artists, and finally into global messengers for the people of the Sahara. This is Tinariwen, the desert rebel rockers who transformed the hypnotic music of their homeland into a gritty new breed of electric blues and made die-hard fans of music heavies from Robert Plant to Bono.

Like the underground water table that feeds the green oasis of Tessalit, the group’s spiritual home in the relentless rock of the Southern Sahara, Tinariwen draw deep draughts from the well of Tuareg culture and their own personal experience on Imidiwan: Companions (World Village; release: October 13, 2009), recorded in the gardens of Tessalit and in the stony, beloved desolation of the surrounding desert.

After years of recording and mixing in distant Malian and European studios, Tinariwen longed to come home again for their latest album, to return sonically to the calm immediacy and signature intensity of the sound that sparked a global music phenomenon. So they tapped French engineer Jean-Paul Romann, who worked with them during their first recording sessions at a radio station in nearby Kidal.

Yet this wasn’t the same Tinariwen that had walked into the sterile confines of the sound booth nearly a decade ago. They didn’t want to go with the flow. They were older, wiser, with an increasingly refined vision of how to convey what they heard in their own music, essences of the desert’s air, sky, rocks, and silence. They knew how to engage with Romann and get just the right sound. Even if that meant jamming in the Sahara.

So Romann set up a studio in Tessalit. In the small house in the middle of the desert, anything could happen. It was a place of hospitality and a hub of spontaneous creativity at all hours: Late one dark night, guitarist and songwriter Abdallah brought by several striking female singers to record. Despite the late hour, a drowsy Romann obligingly cued up the backing tracks, and the women produced some of the delicate and powerful chorus parts that feature prominently on the album.

Tinariwen also insisted they strike out into the wilderness surrounding Tessalit to record in some of the rocky valleys and windswept plateaus dear to Tinariwen’s hearts. Following the lead of Ibrahim, Romann captured the band’s sound in places Ibrahim and other members had discovered over the course of many years playing in the desert, capturing a vibe that Romann feels is “just in the air” of this corner of the Sahara.

The air around Tessalit is rife with something akin to the blues, what Tuaregs call “assuf,” a word so complex it’s next to impossible to translate. Yet ask Tinariwen what they play, and they’ll likely reply that they play assuf. It’s more than a style of music; it’s deep personal longing, loneliness, and nostalgia that haunts the once mighty Tuareg, who have been increasingly marginalized over the past two centuries. Assuf reflects everything outside the companionship of the campfire, the eerie world of the spirits, the forlorn darkness of the desert at night.

Yet it’s the lonesome desert blues and the defiant pride of the Tuaregs that unite the diverse creative personalities of the band. Tinariwen, now with two generations of members, is a band of songwriters, each with their own take on Tuareg music, be it the rapid-fire, rap-like incantations of traditional male poetry that open the bluesy “Tenhert” or the traditionally female drum circles of the tindé that pulse behind the anthemic “Kel Tamashek.” Though longtime companions, Tinariwen’s members reveal different facets of the desert’s fertile possibilities.

Take Ibrahim, the band’s founder, creative leader, prolific songwriter, and guitar master. Though he had only seen guitars in Western movies shown at bush cinemas, he built his own as a child from wire and watercans (echoed on the album cover, a chance photo of children taken near the latest recording session). This ingenuity served him well as a refugee in a Libyan camp, where he first rallied with his companions to fight for Tuareg freedom across Mali and Niger, experiences chronicled in songs like “Imidiwan Afrik Temdam” and “Tenalle Chegret.” Now, still sleeping on occasion in a traditional tent at the center of his Tessalit compound, he pleads the case of the Tuareg youth (“Chabiba”) and puts his royalties where his mouth is, supporting a local café and other youth-oriented projects.

Or take the troubled yet wildly inspired Mohammed Ag Itlale, who goes by the nickname Japonais due to his almost Asian looks. Known as the greatest Tamashek poet of his generation, his tempestuous life has sparked deeply personal meditations like “Tamodjerazt Assis,” where he sings bitterly that regret is like a termite, eating the heart from the inside, a harsh yet elegant simile reflecting the poetic depths of traditional Tamashek verse.

Or Abdallah Ag Lamida, dubbed “Intidao,” one of the younger generation, who spends his time travelling from village to village visiting friends and family when not playing with the band. His passionate concern for social causes echoes Tinariwen’s long commitment to change and improvement in their community, and his condemnation of the widespread unemployment and apathy plaguing his people resounds on “Imazeghen N Adagh.”

Or Alhassane Ag Touhami (“Hassan”), whose fierce spirit as a guerilla fighter earned him the youthful moniker of “Lion of the Desert”—though he now scoffs modestly at this nom de guerre—and whose songs, like “Ere Tasfata Adounia,” have taken on a serious philosophical bent, contemplating the value of life and loss.

“At the end of the rebellion, we saw that violence only hurt people and spread death. But we knew we needed to make people aware of our culture. Our music was born out of suffering and that made it political,” Hassan recalls. The guerillas became guitarists, at first playing music so politically charged that simply owning a Tinariwen cassette could get fans arrested.

“Now,” Hassan continues, “we want to show the world what is here in the desert and show the Tuareg people more of the world, so that we can change and grow.” And they continue to bring the sounds of the world—from Bob Dylan to Bob Marley—to the desert, recently turning to filesharing via cell phones, Bluetooth, and battered computer speakers where they once traded worn cassettes.

For Ibrahim, companionship (a rough translation of the album title, Imidiwan) is about more than the gang of youngsters he grew up with or the close bonds he shares with Tinariwen’s musicians, with other Tuaregs who endured exile, or with the Tessalit community. “I am not just talking about the Tamashek,” Ibrahim explains. “I’m talking about Malians, people from Niger, about my friends from all over Africa. And all the friends we’ve made around the world who have helped us.”

These companions have heard the group’s message of pride, loss, and longing. On a more global scale, Tinariwen see themselves as desert-criers, messengers transmitting the true image—both good and bad—of their beloved home to those who will listen.

“You hear so many lies about the desert. People need to come and see what things are really like. And the more who come, the better,” Ibrahim smiles. Listening to the sounds of the oasis and rocky barrens that echo on Imidiwan may be the next best thing.